tuxbox wrote:I now agree with you on the Vegan issue, however, the father letting his daughter die, would not be considered wrong in certain cultures. Just as stoning women in the Middle East is not considered immoral in those cultures. Where is my logic going wrong here?

The moral issue is about what you knew (because evolutionary moral cues were informing you), independently of other views.Perhaps the father felt it was wrong to let his daughter die, but would have suffered a similar fate for trying to save him, ie., death.Perhaps the family of the person being stoned to death also felt that killing in that manner was morally wrong, but would not intervene for reasons the father in the first example did not.The are countless war anecdotes where soldiers are ordered to kill non-combatants indiscriminately, and even deliberately. Their penalty for disobeying the order would be death. Except for religious fanatics who score virgins in heaven for killing innocents, we all know that such killings are morally reprehensible.From a biological perspective the answer would be found through your capacity to empathise with the subject, which is easiest done by putting yourself in their shoes.

tuxbox wrote:I now agree with you on the Vegan issue, however, the father letting his daughter die, would not be considered wrong in certain cultures. Just as stoning women in the Middle East is not considered immoral in those cultures. Where is my logic going wrong here?

The moral issue is about what you knew (because evolutionary moral cues were informing you), independently of other views.Perhaps the father felt it was wrong to let his daughter die, but would have suffered a similar fate for trying to save him, ie., death.Perhaps the family of the person being stoned to death also felt that killing in that manner was morally wrong, but would not intervene for reasons the father in the first example did not.The are countless war anecdotes where soldiers are ordered to kill non-combatants indiscriminately, and even deliberately. Their penalty for disobeying the order would be death. Except for religious fanatics who score virgins in heaven for killing innocents, we all know that such killings are morally reprehensible.From a biological perspective the answer would be found through your capacity to empathise with the subject, which is easiest done by putting yourself in their shoes.

I'm in a unique position regarding veganism, as my own diet is so quirky that I've coined a separate word for it: carnarian. Most non-vegetarians/vegans consume fruits and vegetables, just not exclusively. Not so for me. Apples, bananas, potatoes (mashed or fried only), and corn (and maybe the occasional peach or pear) are the only ones I'll even touch. For somewhat intractable reasons, I just find pretty much any other foods in that group utterly repulsive. The best way I can describe it is to say that I feel like I'm eating grass whenever I try them. Blech! Now, offer me meat or dairy, and you're automatically on my good side!

On a less subjective note, I once watched a "Stupid Meat-Eater Comments" video by TheVeganAtheist, and the one phrase that kept coming up in the poster's responses was "sentient animals." While I agreed that sapience/sentience might be a very useful criterion to determine which creatures it is ethical to kill and eat, he failed to provide any real rubric for deeming cows, pigs, etc. "sentient." I posted a comment on the video to that effect, suggesting as a possible candidate the "mirror test" of self-awareness, which involves testing if the creature recognizes its reflection as an image of itself rather than another specimen.

As it happens, most or all of the species known to pass this test (certain apes, cetaceans, and elephants) are not typically consumed by humans anyway, but at the same time, most or all of the West's most beloved pets do not. I would, I hope understandably, balk at the notion of frying up either one of my two calico kitties. My tentative answer to this problem is to propose that objective tests for sentience be used to determine which animals should be considered universally immoral to eat, but any liberties or limits beyond that should be left up to individual cultures. For example, I may not agree with a culture that worships cows and eats dogs, but as long as neither passes the sentience test, I would be obligated to acknowledge that to call such a culture inherently immoral would be an ethnocentric imposition on my part. However, I would be far more justified in calling chimp-eaters or dolphin-eaters "barbaric."

This raises a more general issue that might steer the discussion back to one of the original topics. Some of my earliest ponderings regarding secular morality was framed in an intercultural way. How, I asked, can we reliably distinguish between intrinsically valid moral judgments and ethnocentric intolerance? For example, most modern Westerners would condemn the Spaniards of earlier ages for viewing the Amerindians as lesser simply because they weren't Catholic, but few of those same people would disagree with the conquistadores for deeming them barbaric due to their practice of human sacrifice. So how and where do we draw the line? It is only fairly recently (i.e. in the last few years or so) that I have found some solidly satisfying solutions in the commentaries of people like Sam Harris and the guy in the "Treatise on Morality" video (which was awesome, by the way). Human sacrifice unambiguously causes unnecessary suffering and death with no greater good to justify it (though convincing the Aztecs of that needlessness and lack of benefit would be a challenge), but ignorance or rejection of Catholicism has no such issues (though again, the Spaniards of the time would probably have begged to differ).

Glossophile wrote: I would, I hope understandably, balk at the notion of frying up either one of my two calico kitties.

Would you baulk if you were starving to death?

Glossophile wrote:This raises a more general issue that might steer the discussion back to one of the original topics. Some of my earliest ponderings regarding secular morality was framed in an intercultural way. How, I asked, can we reliably distinguish between intrinsically valid moral judgments and ethnocentric intolerance?

Who is deciding the moral judgement is intrinsically valid, whatever that means?There is a clear divide between a societal moral determination, and a normative one. You seem to have mixed the senses with your questions.From a societal or cultural perspective we can determine that a particular practice was "accepted" and, therefore, was regarded as the right thing to do despite it causing harm (inclusive of pain, injury or death). Would it be appropriate to call that practice moral?The real problem is that morality has so many potential meanings that one can run on any number of definitions and it's still "morality" in some sense.The normative sense is derived from what we would reason. Typically to prevent or minimise harm would be agreed as good and proper actions. When defined in this manner, most of the questions you have raised on morality are not so difficult to resolve.

Yes, I suppose I would eat a cat or two if my only other options were death or cannibalism. It wouldn't be an easy decision, but I don't think there's any question which choice I would ultimately make. I would objectively justify it by saying that, while life is generally preferable to death, the most sentient life takes precedence. Hence, if preserving the life of a less sentient creature means the death of a more sentient creature, then killing the former becomes justifiable.

By "intrinsically valid," what I meant was that the justification is traceable to considerations that all cultures would agree on. It is more or less "what we would reason," as you said, though I would not have framed it that way at the time I first started asking the question. Human sacrifice verifiably causes unnecessary suffering and death, while a lack of Catholicism does not (in fact, if anything, it reduces unnecessary suffering, LOL).

What you seem to be suggesting is that only universal (i.e. rationally tractable, or "normative" as you say) ethics be referred to as "morality," while culture-dependent (i.e. "societal" as you say) judgments be expressed in terms of "acceptability." If this is indeed what you were saying, then it is a rather intriguing and appealing perspective.

Glossophile wrote:What you seem to be suggesting is that only universal (i.e. rationally tractable, or "normative" as you say) ethics be referred to as "morality," while culture-dependent (i.e. "societal" as you say) judgments be expressed in terms of "acceptability." If this is indeed what you were saying, then it is a rather intriguing and appealing perspective.

If we are clear about the "type" of morality we are talking about, then there is a context for understanding. The decision to eat one's pets can be understood and justified in an evolutionary context. I would not regard it as moral as I have personal preference for attaching "goodness" to moral decision making. A step further on the example and you might question if eating your pets would make a difference. And a step beyond that would be to spare your pets because of your love for them (substitute a child for your pets and see the difference!).

itsdemtitans wrote:2. Morality. Wouldn't morality be completely arbitrary if no God existed. As I understand it, God's nature is the standard of morality. But without that standard, doesn't that mean there's no objective morality at all? If there is none, why is it humans seem to be born with an inborn sense of morality? Could a purely naturalistic world account for this inborn sense of right and wrong? If so, how?

Ok so I'm back.

I haven't read the replies in this topic yet, but I thought I would dive straight in on this one.

Morality would not be completely arbitrary if no God existed. Arbitrary implies without reason, essentially random. This is not the case, if I were to ask you for a secular reason not to kill someone you might say something like "I wouldn't want anyone to kill me", or "it would cause unnecessary suffering in the world for me to kill someone". This is the opposite of arbitrary. Most of our modern moral standards are reasoned in such a fashion. An arbitrary moral standard would be "wearing blue on Thursday mornings is evil", because I couldn't give any rational justification for it. Of course we can debate our moral values, but they are far from arbitrary.

Can you give a precise definition of what God's nature is? Without doing so we cannot really progress in this discussion in any meaningful way. It would be like me saying I follow my friend Steve's moral standard, without declaring what that actually is.

What do you mean by objective morality?

I would put forth that humans have an innate sense of morality for several reasons. Firstly we are neurologically hard-wired for empathy. We have neurons in our brains called mirror neurons. For instance if I touch my nose a certain set of neurons would fire as I do so. A sub-set of those same neurons would also fire if I watch you touching your nose. It is as though my brain mirrors your actions sub consciously. This is obviously advantageous because it allows us to learn via imitation. A side effect of this is being able to put ourselves in another's shoes. If we see someone crying uncontrollably our brain mirrors it in the way I described and we play it in our mind as though we are experiencing the same thing. We empathize with that person. I haven't done the topic justice and some of the details may be a bit hazy, for a clearer picture I would recommend the work of V.S. Ramachandran.

As a social species our evolution is bound by actions that allow us to prosper in a dynamic group. It is better for us to get along than to be chastised by our group because it works to our advantage. To be cast out is a death sentence. Thus over time we develop behaviours that favour being nice and cooperative towards our group rather than antagonistic. These behaviours do not extend to out-group individuals, a trait which still plagues our species. Much of the conflict in society falls into this in-group vs out-group conflict. We extend our good will to members of our group, and dehumanize the out-group---which makes it easier for us to kill them (possibly as a means for intellectually dulling the empathetic effects of our mirror neurons [although that is purely a guess on my part]).

These are a couple of hastily hashed out reasons why I think our neurology and psychology favours an innate sense of moral goodness. Often-times however, our moral sensibilities are tied completely to our capacity for reason. A lot of the moral issues I feel passionately about are inspired by the fact that I have sat and thought about them, I was not born being against the war on drugs for example. I thought about it.

This post is a bit hasty and probably contains scientific errors, please feel free to correct rubbish I have said.

Laurens wrote:... These are a couple of hastily hashed out reasons why I think our neurology and psychology favours an innate sense of moral goodness. Often-times however, our moral sensibilities are tied completely to our capacity for reason. A lot of the moral issues I feel passionately about are inspired by the fact that I have sat and thought about them, I was not born being against the war on drugs for example. I thought about it.

This post is a bit hasty and probably contains scientific errors, please feel free to correct rubbish I have said.

When you say "the War on Drugs", do you mean the way it's being carried out by governments (e.g. the DEA in the U.S.)? Or are you against any criminalization of drugs at all? The reason I ask is that that may be a poor example for a moral issue, because it may not be a moral issue at all. IIRC, the War on Drugs in the U.S. is statistically a failure in both expenditure and success rate.

However, I will not dodge your point. There are moral issues that have to be sat and thought about, and don't just come about intrinsically. I would argue, though, that the moral issues one reasons out are just extensions of the innate morals one has. For example, a well-debated modern moral issue is the issue of abortion. Both sides agree that killing an innocent human is wrong, so both sides try to appeal to that standard. Those for abortion argue that one should not empathize for what is essentially a mass of unformed cells. The other argues that the potential to become life should be considered life itself. That being said, neither side goes, "To Hell with your standard, I just want to have/prevent an abortion!" They both appeal to the common moral ground of "killing innocents is bad", and then work to explain why they think an embryo is either an innocent or not.

I hope you understand what I'm saying. I'm willing to answer any questions or debate any points.

Laurens wrote:... These are a couple of hastily hashed out reasons why I think our neurology and psychology favours an innate sense of moral goodness. Often-times however, our moral sensibilities are tied completely to our capacity for reason. A lot of the moral issues I feel passionately about are inspired by the fact that I have sat and thought about them, I was not born being against the war on drugs for example. I thought about it.

This post is a bit hasty and probably contains scientific errors, please feel free to correct rubbish I have said.

When you say "the War on Drugs", do you mean the way it's being carried out by governments (e.g. the DEA in the U.S.)? Or are you against any criminalization of drugs at all? The reason I ask is that that may be a poor example for a moral issue, because it may not be a moral issue at all. IIRC, the War on Drugs in the U.S. is statistically a failure in both expenditure and success rate.

However, I will not dodge your point. There are moral issues that have to be sat and thought about, and don't just come about intrinsically. I would argue, though, that the moral issues one reasons out are just extensions of the innate morals one has. For example, a well-debated modern moral issue is the issue of abortion. Both sides agree that killing an innocent human is wrong, so both sides try to appeal to that standard. Those for abortion argue that one should not empathize for what is essentially a mass of unformed cells. The other argues that the potential to become life should be considered life itself. That being said, neither side goes, "To Hell with your standard, I just want to have/prevent an abortion!" They both appeal to the common moral ground of "killing innocents is bad", and then work to explain why they think an embryo is either an innocent or not.

I hope you understand what I'm saying. I'm willing to answer any questions or debate any points.

I think drug abuse and addiction are at base a healthcare issue, and it very much is a moral issue when we throw people who need healthcare into prison. Of course, its not always a health care issue either, altering perception through the use of certain chemicals is fascinating and amusing for some and a lot do so with no great lasting harm.

It's a moral issue when the government presupposes that it has a right to protect people from doing certain kinds of harm to themselves, yet not others. Why is MDMA illegal when horse riding is not?

It's also a moral issue when people serve jail time and get a criminal record for using and growing a plant (cannabis) which is demonstrably safer than the big 2 legal drugs.

Laurens wrote:I think drug abuse and addiction are at base a healthcare issue, and it very much is a moral issue when we throw people who need healthcare into prison. Of course, its not always a health care issue either, altering perception through the use of certain chemicals is fascinating and amusing for some and a lot do so with no great lasting harm.

It's a moral issue when the government presupposes that it has a right to protect people from doing certain kinds of harm to themselves, yet not others. Why is MDMA illegal when horse riding is not?

It's also a moral issue when people serve jail time and get a criminal record for using and growing a plant (cannabis) which is demonstrably safer than the big 2 legal drugs.

Right, so the view is that it's a moral issue to put people suffering from addiction (or just those trying to have some fun) into jail. I do agree with you that people shouldn't be jailed for possession and/or use of drugs. However, that's the reason those behind the War on Drugs try so hard to dehumanize drug users. By simply labeling them as "criminals", "lawbreakers", or even just "potheads", drug users are viewed as a "them", being set apart from the majority of society's "us". Morally, people want to help their fellow man, but if the fellow man is viewed as an outcast who's only going to hurt others and *gasp* "the CHILDREN!", that person would no longer be seen as a fellow human being, unfortunately.

Laurens wrote:I think drug abuse and addiction are at base a healthcare issue, and it very much is a moral issue when we throw people who need healthcare into prison. Of course, its not always a health care issue either, altering perception through the use of certain chemicals is fascinating and amusing for some and a lot do so with no great lasting harm.

It's a moral issue when the government presupposes that it has a right to protect people from doing certain kinds of harm to themselves, yet not others. Why is MDMA illegal when horse riding is not?

It's also a moral issue when people serve jail time and get a criminal record for using and growing a plant (cannabis) which is demonstrably safer than the big 2 legal drugs.

Right, so the view is that it's a moral issue to put people suffering from addiction (or just those trying to have some fun) into jail. I do agree with you that people shouldn't be jailed for possession and/or use of drugs. However, that's the reason those behind the War on Drugs try so hard to dehumanize drug users. By simply labeling them as "criminals", "lawbreakers", or even just "potheads", drug users are viewed as a "them", being set apart from the majority of society's "us". Morally, people want to help their fellow man, but if the fellow man is viewed as an outcast who's only going to hurt others and *gasp* "the CHILDREN!", that person would no longer be seen as a fellow human being, unfortunately.

Indeed it is easy to view drug addicts with disgust and contempt. I've found dirty needles at work and it does make me physically repulsed, but I have to remind myself that whoever left it there was a person, who was more than likely trying to escape some trauma or issues.

I'd imagine that if we looked at it we might see a societal issue(s) that leads to drug abuse (homelessness comes to mind). We should look to addressing some of the root causes rather than attempting to sweep the symptoms under the rug by putting drug users in prison.

We're probably veering off topic, so I shall attempt to steer it back. As you can see this issue is one that does require reasoning. We do get a moral gut feeling to be sure, but that same instinct that leads me to feel compassion for drug addicts might lead someone to argue for prohibition because of their compassion for the harm drug addicts do their families and communities.

In a great deal of issues we do have to reason out our position. Our feelings can often run counter to this too or one can have conflicting feelings, as with the example of my feeling disgusted when finding used needles (but also compassionate towards drug addicts). I'm not sure the percentage but it would be interesting to compute gut feeling vs reason when it comes to moral quandaries.

itsdemtitans wrote:Genesis is purely Alegorical, meant to convey our place in the grand scheme of things.

Herein lies the first problem, as I see things.

If Genesis is purely allegorical, and you accept evolution, especially the place of humanity within the evolutionary paradigm, then we have an issue from a Christian perspective. The problem is this:

If Genesis is allegory, then Adam and Eve didn't exist. This also gels well with evolution, in that there could have been no 'first humans' (evolution is a population phenomenon). With that in mind, how are we to address original sin? Without original sin, what is it that we need original sin for?

1. DNA. It's almost like an actual code,

The operative word here is 'almost'.

Really, though, this entire line of enquiry is flawed. DNA is chemicals. As I've said in the debate thread, the 'letters' of the code are the initial letters of the names that we've given to the chemicals. Note that the important words in that sentence are 'we've given'. Much import is given in some quarters to the idea that DNA is in some objective sense a code. It isn't. We've assigned tags to the chemicals in DNA, and we've treated them like a language, and even built chemical 'words' out of them, describing their interactions. That doesn't mean that DNA is actually made of letters, or that they make up actual words. They simply don't.

it contains actual information for the proteins used to build an organism.

Did somebody mention information?

Here, we require a definition of information that is robust. Now, there are two robust formulations of information theory, and both of them need to be considered. The first is that of Claude Shannon and, while this is the formulation that most of them will cite, largely due to apologist screeds erecting various claims about information having to contain some sort of message and therefore requiring somebody to formulate the message, it doesn't robustly apply to DNA, because it's the wrong treatment of information. Indeed, when dealing with complexity in information, you MUST use Kolmogorov, because that's the one that deals with complexity.

So just what is information? Well, in Shannon theory, information can be defined as 'reduction in uncertainty'. Shannon theory deals with fidelity in signal transmission and reception, since Shannon worked in communications. Now, given this, we have a maximum information content, defined as the lowest possible uncertainty. Now, if we have a signal, say a TV station, and your TV is perfectly tuned, and there is no noise added between transmission and reception of the TV signal, then you receive the channel cleanly and the information content is maximal. If, however, the TV is tuned slightly off the channel, or your reception is in some other respect less than brilliant, you get noise in the channel. The older ones of you will remember pre-digital television in which this was manifest in the form of 'bees' in the picture, and crackling and noise in the audio. Nowadays, you tend to get breaks in the audio, and pixelated blocks in the picture. They amount to the same thing, namely noise, or 'an increase in uncertainty'. It tells us that any deviation from the maximal information content, which is a fixed quantity, constitutes degradation of the information source, or 'Shannon entropy' (Shannon actually chose this term because the equation describing his 'information entropy' is almost identical to the Boltzmann equation for statistical entropy, as used in statistical mechanics.

This seems to gel well with the creationist claims, and is the source of all their nonsense about 'no new information in DNA'. Of course, there are several major failings in this treatment.

The first comes from Shannon himself, from the book that he wrote with Warren Weaver on the topic:

The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.

So we see that Shannon himself doesn't actually agree with this treatment of information relied on so heavily by the creationists.

The second is that Shannon's is not the only rigorous formulation of information theory. The other comes from Andrey Kolmogorov, whose theory deals with information storage. The information content in Kolmogorov theory is a feature of complexity or, better still, can be defined as the amount of compression that can be applied to it. This latter can be formulated in terms of the shortest algorithm that can be written to represent the information.

Returning to our TV channel, we see a certain incongruence between the two formulations, because in Kolmogorov theory, the noise that you encounter when the TV is slightly off-station actually represents an increase in information, where in Shannon theory, it represents a decrease! How is this so? Well, it can be quite easily summed up, and the summation highlights the distinction between the two theories, both of which are perfectly robust and valid.

Let's take an example of a message, say a string of 100 1s. In it's basic form, that would look like this:

We now have a string of 9 1s followed by a zero, repeated 9 times. We now clearly have an increase in information content, even though the number of digits is exactly the same. However, there is a periodicity to it, so a simple compression algorithm can still be applied.

Now, clearly, we have something that approaches an entirely random pattern. The more random a pattern is, the longer the algorithm required to describe it, and the higher the information content.

Returning once again to our TV station, the further you get away from the station, the more random the pattern becomes, and the longer the algorithm required to reproduce it, until you reach a point in which the shortest representation of the signal is the thing itself. In other words, no compression can be applied.

This is actually how compression works when you compress images for storage in your computer using the algorithms that pertain to Jpeg, etc. The uncompressed bitmap is the uncompressed file, while the Jpeg compression algorithm, roughly, stores it as '100 pixels of x shade of blue followed by 300 pixels of black', etc. Thus, the more complicated an image is in terms of periodicity and pattern, the less it can be compressed and the larger the output file will be.

What the above does is comprehensively demolish any and all creationist claims concerning information.

What do Ribosomes do?

“..the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” Tolstoy

Sadly, hack is banned as I'm sure you can tell. I wouldn't expect an answer

I find it amazing that someone can turn on a computer/tablet/smart phone, log into an internet forum, type up a post, and submit it without doing a simple Google search to answer such a simple question.